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NASA in Huntsville puts new eye on the Earth with Pathfinder telescope

Pathfinder image

This first light image from ISERV shows the mouth of the Rio San Pablo in Veraguas, Panama, as it empties into the Golfo de Montijo. This wetland supports an important local fishery and provides habitat for many mammals and reptiles as well as several species of nesting and wintering water birds. The image was captured Feb. 16. (ISERV)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- NASA researchers in Huntsville are excitedly pouring over new images of Earth beaming down from a camera installed in the Earth-facing window of the International Space Station earlier this year. "Ecstatic," project manager Yancy Young said this week of the results so far.

The first images, including the view above of the Rio San Pablo emptying into a bay in Panama, were taken by Pathfinder, a commercial camera and telescope combination mounted in the space station's Destiny module -- the same place from which astronauts have taken thousands of photos of Earth from space. Ultimately, NASA hopes Pathfinder will help nations and service organizations respond to natural disasters and environmental changes.

"We are very happy we got this particular site on the Pacific coast of Panama," ISERV principal investigator Burgess Howell said of the key wetland that provides habitat for animals and nesting areas for water birds. "It's one of our primary areas of interest, being in Central America."

Pathfinder was developed by Marshall and flown to space aboard the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's HTV-3 vehicle. The space station's crew "was crucial in getting the system assembled," Howell said, but operations will be controlled remotely from Huntsville in coordination with a global hub network.

Pathfinder, officially called the "ISS SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System (ISERV)," is part of the larger SERVIR program. A partnership of NASA, the U.S. Agency for International Development and international organizations, SERVIR is designed to help developing nations and private aid organizations deal with rapid or long-term changes on the ground.

Being aboard the station, which orbits the Earth every 93 minutes, allows Pathfinder to take frequent images of, for example, a flood or earthquake damage. "It's sometimes possible to shoot a target twice in a single day," Howell said, "and in many places not difficult to get repeat shots every couple of days."

View full sizeThis image of the Pathfinder camera system shows the commercial camera attached to the telescope that makes up the primary hardware. (NASA photo)

The camera has 20 degrees of motion on board the station. That translates to 140 miles either side of the station's ground track or 70 percent of the Earth's surface and 95 percent of its population.

How good is the ISERV camera? It can image "a fairly small footprint" of roughly 10 by 16 kilometers. "Inside that, as we tweak the focus, we can get 3.5 to 3.5 meters of resolution," Howell said, "as good as the previous generation of commercial satellites."

Unlike satellite imagery, however, which takes time to process, a future Pathfinder system could get "near real-time images" and transmit them within hours, NASA says. That could make a big difference in disaster response. The camera is also capable of taking multiple quick images on each pass over the target.

The system operates in cooperation with targeting hubs in Central America, Kenya and Nepal and
operators on consoles "seven days a week, nine hours a day" at the
Huntsville ISERV center, Howell said. At its heart is software that identifies the station's location and orbit and calculates from that data upcoming image opportunities

The Pathfinder team will continue experimenting with the camera over the next few months. They are "being fairly opportunistic" about targets now, seeking clear skies and good lighting. But the team is already receiving image requests from partner agencies, and Howell said, "We're trying to accommodate them."

"The addition of ISERV will enhance the growing set of tools aboard the station to monitor Earth," Julie Robinson, International Space Station program scientist at Johnson Space Center, said in 2012 when the camera was announced. "It reaffirms the station's commitment to helping solve global issues."